What's a click farm, and what do they look like?

The world of click farms has evolved in sophisticated ways in recent years. While many of us conjure the idea of a vast call center-type room with people clicking on links, nowadays a click farm can be controlled and manipulated by a handful of operators.

As their prevalence has grown, so too has the impact. Click farms can be used to target competitors and can drive false traffic and engagement metrics, misleading people, clients and potential investors. It’s therefore vital to guard against the impact click farms can have.

In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn what a click farm is and why people use them, and we take a look inside a real-life click farm to show you the face of click fraud.

Crucially, we also explain how to guard and protect against the impact of farm traffic, which can help to maximize profits and results on your ad campaigns.

Explain click farms like I'm 5

Let's start with the simple explanation you came here for, then we'll take a deeper look into click farms. So what, exactly, is click farm?

A click farm is a bank of devices (phones, servers, etc.) that are rigged up to continuously create fake engagement on ads, apps, or websites. Click farms may be either computer controlled, or manually operated (where a real human controls the interactions).

They’re organized operations which tend to involve the use of low-paid workers or automated bots, which are used to click, like, share, view or follow posts or accounts on social media platforms and websites.

Before automation technology became as advanced as it is today, click farms were like vast call centers where low-skilled workers were employed on tiny wages to complete these repetitive tasks.

Nowadays, an individual can operate a large click farm alone. They do so by hooking up mobile devices, like phones and iPads, to networks where they use bots to repeat processes over and over.

What is a click farm used for?

A click farm for hire can provide many different types of services, and the results they promise can be eye-catching and appealing for some people. They can provide:

• Views on the likes of YouTube videos
• Comments on social media posts to mimic engagement
• Likes on social media posts
• Traffic jumps for websites
• Boosting follower numbers
• Writing fake reviews of products
• Clicks on paid advertisements, such as Google Ads
• The spreading of information, social media groups or profiles, and articles

A struggling social media influencer may lament that their follower figures aren’t budging, so instead they turn to click fraud to help boost it. Nobody wins in this situation. It may look good to have more followers on the surface, but every post will gain little or no engagement, so it won’t fool anybody.

Click farms, Google Ads and PPC campaigns

Click farms are also used as an offensive weapon by companies against their rivals. In some niches of paid advertising, the competition is fierce, with costs per click (CPC) for some key phrases exceeding well over $100. Many companies have a finite budget when it comes to paid advertising like Google Ads and Meta ads. A competitor can exhaust that with the help of a click farm.

It’s for reasons like this that we developed Hitprobe, and we explain how such technology can help you guard against these competitor tactics further below.

How do click farms work?

Click farms rely on certain types of technology to function, such as proxy servers, virtual private networks (VPNs) and onion routers.

VPNs enable you to scramble your IP address so that you appear in a different location, which can help secure your anonymity online. Click farms use this technology to help drive web traffic from different locations, which can help evade detection. This can also help them manipulate location-based traffic if, for example, a client wants to boost traffic from the United Kingdom.

Onion routers also offer click farms multi-layered anonymity by passing internet traffic through several layers of encryption. The most famous example of this is the Tor Network.

With the help of these technologies, bot farms follow a simple and repetitive process that generally involves:

1. The creation of fake accounts that can navigate the likes of 2-factor authentication (2FA)
2. Setting up automation for bots to mimic human actions, like liking a post, following an account or commenting on a post
3. Scheduling tasks so that engagements occur at a more organic rate
4. Repeating the task, which may involve viewing a video repeatedly

The dark side of click farms

Click farms operate in a legal gray area. It all comes down to their practices and the willingness to enforce the law. As a result, click farms tend to be found in low income countries with large labor markets and less stringent laws. Some of the most popular locations for click farms include:

• 🇮🇳 India - given its huge population (over a billion people), access to high-speed internet and good levels of English speaking workers, click farms are common in India
• 🇧🇩 Bangladesh - this is a country of people skilled in computers and a large, low-cost labor market with weak regulations in place. Many a click farm can be found here as a result
• 🇨🇳 China - although a country with stringent laws, China does not crack down on click farms as harshly as you may expect. Provided that online fraud and interference with government activity is avoided, not much attention is paid to the activity
• 🇵🇭 Philippines - with little regulation on click farming and a large English-speaking population proficient with computers, click farms are common in the Philippines
• 🇮🇩 Indonesia - like other countries in this list, Indonesia’s legal framework doesn’t extend much to click farms, leaving them in a gray area. Click farms are popular here, with many local services linked to social media platforms, encouraging clicks in exchange for rewards

Given the nature of this job, the pay is very poor. Some commentators and analysts have gone as far as saying that click farms are a new type of digital slavery, with workers paid next to nothing for significant hours of work each day.

A look inside a real click farm

Given what we’ve discussed above, it’s easy to imagine a click farm as looking like a sweatshop, with hundreds of people packed into a small room, sitting at computers clicking their mouse over and over. While some click farms like this no doubt exist, more sophisticated operations now run with the help of bots and algorithms.

Someone who’s really unveiled the shroud on the inside of click farms is photographer and investigator, Jack Latham. As part of his new book, Beggar’s Honey, Latham got a first-hand look at the inside of a click farm in Vietnam.

As you can see, one person can manage row upon row of mobile phones and multiple devices at a time. Click farm operators do very little. Automated processes operate on each one, generating vast amounts of artificial likes, shares and follows on social media platforms. And this is just one of scores of click farms, some much, much larger than this.

If you’d like to see more real-life examples of click fraud, head here to read our guide.

Are click farms legal?

This all begs the question: are click farms legal? Given how staff are paid so little and how they manipulate and distort data, and how they can be used to attack competitors, you’d think a hardline approach would be taken. But the reality is much different, as we’ve explored above.

While Western countries are better at enforcing laws, click farms pop up in parts of the world with weaker regulatory frameworks. As a result, they’re like a wound left to fester.

With no sign of governments taking action to make click farms illegal, it’s become more important than ever for individuals and businesses to take steps to protect themselves. Let’s take a look at how to spot the signs of a bot attack.

How do you spot the work of a click farm?

If you want to protect yourself against click farm attacks, then it’s vital to know the signs. The biggest red flags will show in your analytics reports, coming in the form of sudden spikes in traffic or engagement. This may come from specific locations, and there may be no real reason behind it.

Another red flag is seeing a lot of traffic but with very low engagement or with high bounce rates, meaning people click on a page and then close it without interacting.

There’s not much more you can do beyond this, however. Click farm bots are designed to interact like humans, and in some click farms, real humans do use and interact with pages and platforms too, making it even harder to detect. That’s why using tools like Hitprobe can make a massive difference to your business. Let’s take a look at how they can help you guard against click farms.

How do I guard against click farms?

As click farms have become more sophisticated, so too has the technology that’s used to detect their fraudulent activity.

Here at Hitprobe, our advanced detection software can help protect your PPC ad budgets from fraudulent and malicious clicks. Even if click farms use IP changes and VPNs, we can catch them, and we don’t just block IP addresses, but entire networks. So if you have a competitor looking to drain your budget, they won’t be able to. This enables you to maximize your ad spend to help you reach even more customers.

For help guarding against ad fraud and click farm attacks for your Google Ads and Meta campaigns, get in touch today. We offer 24/7 protection, excellent customer service and a free package to allow you to implement test and try out.